Municipality intensifies crackdown on partitioned villas
The Doha Municipality has intensified crackdown on partitioned villas across the city, says a senior official.
The municipality recently booked an Asian national who made illegal partitioning in seven villas and sublet it, disclosed Salem Hammoud Al Shafi, director of monitoring department at the municipality.
Earlier he was caught in a similar offence when he was found involved in partitioning two villas for subletting it to the tenants. He has been referred to the authorities concerned for further action.
The Peninsula reports that the amended law regulating the safety of buildings was issued in 2014, enabling civic authorities to clamp down on illegally partitioned villas and apartments which have been mushrooming all over due to rising demand for housing and shortages.
The law has banned any alteration in the building without an official approval from the authorities concerned. The civic authorities of late launched a country-wide crackdown in efforts to strictly implement the law.
The law amended a previous such legislation that was enforced some 31 years ago, in 1984.
Limited-income expatriate families and individuals mostly rely on illegally partitioned houses due to skyrocketing rents of independent residential units.
In another major campaign, the municipality blacklisted 39 contracting companies and engineering consultancy firms since the beginning of this year.
The list has been circulated to all municipalities and all their transactions have been frozen until they rectify their status, said the official.
Any erring company rectifying the mistakes will be immediately removed from the blacklist.
shafqat-hayat: No one forces us to come here - do they ?
This is a way of controlling unwanted influx of expatriates' families.
Actually They dont want human beings, they want slaves- who has to be treated like an animal.
They copy west for things they like, but when it comes to Expatriate facilities & Justice: they have different Rules & strict Implementations.
First they raised the basic income requirement so that low earner worker cannot bring family, now they are doing this. Shall we fix the canvas tents beside the road? i afraid that will also be removed by Municipality. Control the Annual rents increase For GOD SAKE.. If GOVT WISHES TO!!
Sadly, people are too stubborn to take the jint and continue to put their loved ones through hardship
They do not need low income families. They only need low income individuals. This is a way of forcing the low income families out of Qatar. They are saying "you are only welcome to stay and work for us but send your family members to your own country". Simple as that
Perhaps it's a way of them telling you to go home
So sad to see similar initiatives from municipality. Why municipality not making any measures to control rent in doha? If they want to curtail villa partition they should have a control on rent as well. Partitioned villa are really a relief for low income expatriates. Now there is no hope for low income people. They will never have a family life once start to work in Qatar. So sad.